Philly’s Living Proof Magazine

Speaking of unusual publications based in Philadelphia, I just visited a coffee shop in Philly’s Old City neighborhood, where I picked up the second issue of what appears to be an alternative sports magazine. Definitely not the sort of thing you tend to see every day, even in a town as sports crazed as this one.

The magazine — it’s called Living Proof — is one of those ultra-small, pocket-sized publications. If you live in a relatively large city, you’ve seen these before — they seem to always be distributed in a controlled circulation manner (they’re given away for free, in other words, just like Vice) and can usually be found in the lobbies of trendy clubs, bars, restaurants, or clothing stores with a teen demographic. The content generally tends to cover those very same things — dance clubs, local DJs, party culture.

Living Proof, on the other hand, is designed to be slightly larger than the average club mag — it just barely fit into the back pocket of my jeans. And surprisingly enough, it also seems to have a fairly healthy sense of humor. That’s to say nothing of the design, which is absolutely knock-down fantastic. Yet editorially speaking, I’m not quite sure these guys have stumbled upon their niche just yet. Take a quick look at the website, for instance, and you’ll see they describe themselves as an arts-music-culture-lifestyle publication. But the staffers and writers themselves appear to be heavily into hip-hop culture, as well as so-called alternative sports like snowboarding. Which is good to some degree, because that also means they have a lot of potential material to work with in future issues.

This certainly isn’t a perfect publication just yet, although it does have quite a lot on the ball. I would definitely recommend picking up a copy if you happen to live within the magazine’s distribution range. Click here to see if you’re in luck.

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ABOUT THE LABOR PARTYWritten by Young Pioneers Media founder Dan Eldridge, The Labor Party is a blog about today's creative and cultural entrepreneurs.

ABOUT THE AUTHORMost recently the managing editor of North American Publishing Company's consumer technology division, Dan is currently based in Philadelphia, where he works as an independent journalist and guidebook author.

Along with co-authoring Lonely Planet guidebooks to Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, and New England, Dan is the author of Moon Pittsburgh (Avalon Travel), the first edition of which was nominated for a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award. Moon Pittsburgh's upcoming third edition will be available in mid-2014.

Dan was also the founding editor of Young Pioneers, a magazine about independent travel culture that was nominated for the Utne Reader's annual Independent Press Awards in 2004. Dan is currently in the process of relaunching Young Pioneers; stay tuned to The Labor Party for updates, or follow @YoungPioneers on Twitter.